What should be the end game for most eve pilots?

[Shin_getter]

If you build it, they will come.

As skill points and isk pile, people will automatically find bigger and bigger goals to focus their effort on. For some, it may involve ever more exotic battle environments, new opponents and tactics, however for the less exploratory player, the end game is usually the biggest, most powerful, general purpose ship he could get into. Cue super cap proliferation: the limits on isk making merely means players take longer before getting into them, and their cost mostly means people refuse to login when the chance of losing their ship is high.

Super Cap really should not be the logical developmental end point for most players, however it seems like the default choice once everything else that can reasonably been trained and flown have been done.

Yes, there are things like X-type fit pirate battleships with implants, drugs, links what not, but it is really not very good bang for the buck in terms of power/cost scaling in most cases and it really is just another battleship with bigger numbers and works as well at 30m sp as at 120m sp.
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I think there is space for some brainstorming on what THE end game options should be once the existing line of subcap is exhausted. Now you can just hit everything expensive with the nerf stick and keep people undock with welpcanes and baddons forever, but I don't think that is the best answer.

I think we may need a line of seriously expensive, high sp ships that fulfill niches that is not "force multiplier", "big bricks cyno-ed around" and enjoyable without having to blob, but I am not exactly sure what it'd ought look like.

[Rynnik]

I can't believe I am responding in a Shin thread but the answer is pretty obvious:

posting on failheap.

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If that isn't enough then consider that EVE is a sandbox and the 'endgame' is what you make it and completely unrelated to SP, ships flown and making more overpowered crap to apease vets.

[Takon Orlani]

Dual box falcon and sabre on an anchored bubble, clearly.

[Shin_getter]

I lurked on kugu and scrapheap before I undocked with my first ibis, what does that make me?

I am sure I am not the only one who plays Eve following standard RPG logic: if there is a bar make it longer, if there is a number, make it bigger and this logic have been extremely successful, making multiple genres of game out of nowhere. If there is nothing else to work for, you'd get just more and more titans before having groups of vets semi-retire into occasional plex burners for occasional new content.

The rich and old is already powerful with the cap/supercap route and that simply isn't that much fun. Perhaps something better can be found.

[Ophichius]

Endgame: Figure out how to get goodfights, spend the rest of your time playing in frigates. (Lower the damn clone prices CCP!)

-O

[Marlona Sky]

Endgame: Figure out how to get goodfights, spend the rest of your time playing in frigates. (Lower the damn clone prices CCP!)

-O

I prefer them to remove it completely tbh.

[Alain Colcer]

CCP should never provide an "end goal" to "win" eve.

The end-game content in eve is without form or shape it can be from being able to enjoy power and wealth on a constant basis regardless if you loose 3 titans a week, to dominate the market in jita, to be the executor of an alliance and command half of null-sec.

The end-game in eve, is what players want to make of it. If you don't grasp that, you don't grasp EvE.

[Lallante]

All of you naysayers are right and wrong at the same time.

No there should be no one end game goal, its a sandbox.

But yes, there urgently needs to be more endgame content and particularly goals if you want vets to stay interested

Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using Tapatalk

[Ophichius]

Amass the largest Titan op Eve has ever seen and simultaneously DD every single Dust 514 match in progress?

I think the real problem is not so much 'no endgame content' as 'current content sorta sucks'. Sov warfare is pretty dead. I know the old POS dropping mechanics for sov holding sucked, but the new SBU mechanics are even worse, in that there's really no less EHP grinding than before, but suddenly there's much less incentive for any side to go beating the snot out of each other. Less conflict = boring = bored vets. Give us some active wars and we'll perk up again.

As for carebear endgame...mining is boring, sucks, and isn't profitable. Manufacturing sucks pretty hard due to WTZ + jump freighters + jump bridges compressing the entire game world by a factor of ten or so and flattenting markets in the process. L4s are a joke, and Incursions are apparently 'too good' for carebears to have. Which is a pity because they're the most interesting thing most carebears will ever encounter.

-O

[Shin_getter]

I believe a design error have occurred where high skill point, wealthy players are funneled into "blob ships" which scales up in power with numbers quickly and have few other uses.

Blob ships have the following properties:
1. Lacks effective disabling 'ewar' (neut/ecm/damp/td) but strengthen quickly with damage boosting effects (web/paint)
2. Low tactical mobility
3. Massive EHP and spider friendly
4. Force multiplication effects (links, bridges, etc)

The old battleship blob into dread and carrier blob into super blobs and titan blobs all follow the logic where the oldest, wealthiest pilot is stuck in tactically uninteresting ships that are barely extension of the FC.

There are some exceptions, like the mach, but they are uncommon and with questionable cost effectiveness and scalability since the nano age. I do wonder if the old nano age balancing makes the "end game" far more fun and desirable despite its problems.
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I think a new ship tree designed for powerful solo/small gang should be on the table for vets.

The features of such ships are as follows:
1. Good at avoiding damage and escaping fights by various ewar, range and mobility options.
2. Strong, strong active tanks over high resist buffer tanks
3. Low combat endurance due to consumerables

These features is well known to simply "do not scale" with fleet sizes, and one can comfortably put INSANE numbers on endgame hulls on grid and still have them die horribly in large fleet engagements. I here put up a example of what I'm thinking about.

Sacrament: Amarr T2 Battleship: Role: Shock Assault Ship

planned build cost around 1.5~2bil

7/6/7 slot layout, 4 turret slots

120% bonus to Large Energy Turret Damage
25% bonus to tracking disruptor Effect
40% bonus to Energy Vampire and Energy Neutralizer range
50% bonus to armor repair amount
100% bonus to overheating (basically doubles the effects of overheating)

Standard T1 resists, Ehp, fitting similar to abbadon but more cpu
Base speed at lv V, 200m/s, 7s align.

[Marlona Sky]

um... what? Sounds like a solo pwn machine for the rich.

[FatFreddy]

120% bonus to Large Energy Turret Damage
25% bonus to tracking disruptor Effect
40% bonus to Energy Vampire and Energy Neutralizer range
50% bonus to armor repair amount
100% bonus to overheating (basically doubles the effects of overheating)

.


lol

derpgetter is at it again

only a couple of these with proper support would dominate everything, especially with your overheating bonus :facepalm:

[Lorkin Desal]

derp derp de derp derp

seriously? My endgame was when I had a char that had all bs all cruiser 5, recon and hac 5, and thanatos 5. now i'm just working on random crap like t2 triage and recon 5.


fuck supercaps.

[I Legionnaire]

Endgame is meta, it's just on you how quickly you get there.

[RoemySchneider]

there should be no 'end game' - in a balanced game you can fly everything you want and be just as useful as the next guy (provided both of you are equally 'skilled'). you can (re-)discover ships as you train them.

...rather than having to fly amarr all day every day

[LordsServant]

um... what? Sounds like a solo pwn machine for the rich.

Not sure if troll or wat.

That's kinda the point here.

For ppl like me or other "bittervets" all we do is stack up stupid amounts of characters (case in point viper shizzle having so many characters its not even funny) and/or stack up more and more titans/SCs(myself, several Raiden/BoB/IT guys I knew).

For us, the game gets meh pretty often. Yes, I can go spend 2-3bil or more on random subcaps with ganglinx and other stuff, but we can only take so much "falcon comes in --> jammed, blob newbies force us to self destruct while permajammed" or other such faggot situations.

I'm not saying giving us an omgwtfbbq pimpmobile as a soloing ship is a good idea per se, but until I see a better one that sounds good to me.

I'm officially post-titan collecting due to the fact that I saw there was really no point almost immediately. What I'm doing now is randomly soloing in smaller ships. I'm having a blast, but slowly getting upset at repeatedly being ganked, falcon'd, etc etc.

Maybe some kinda of superduper bittervet frigate? I'm not looking for a lolawful dramiel, but maybe something like a slicer? Obviously OP as fuck(slicer is) but if you don't know what you're doing and/or mess up, you will die very very fast very very quickly(like slicer).

I've been trying to keep myself going with goals, but other than "get a trillion isk" or "lead the most badass 0.0 mercenary alliance ingame" or "get (a) titan(s)" what is there for us older ~bittervets~ to do?

Especially skillwise - yes no character in eve can train all skills to 5, but it's not particularly hard for characters to get every skill ingame trained. Every char I know of from my age and earlier is p. much near max for everything - all we do is randomly pick a skill to train to 5.

Endless rehashing of old content eventually does get old after 5-10 years.....

-Lords

[Shin_getter]

120% bonus to Large Energy Turret Damage
25% bonus to tracking disruptor Effect
40% bonus to Energy Vampire and Energy Neutralizer range
50% bonus to armor repair amount
100% bonus to overheating (basically doubles the effects of overheating)

.
only a couple of these with proper support would dominate everything, especially with your overheating bonus :facepalm:
1v1 and 5v5? It is as intended. However if tailored against, even 2~3 ships at adding up to under 200m can beat this.

However 100v100 and 500v500? It'd totally lose the isk war badly to traditional fleet ships since it does not have features suitable for fleet combat. It is not like structure grinds with constant reinforcements lasts only 5 minutes, or disabling ewar could be efficiently used or that a good bombing run can't welp them very silly. At 4 turret slots with +100% bonus for 8 effective turret slots, it'd have worst sustained dps and ehp, resists than a similarly fit abaddon. With TiDi there is no upper limit on multiboxing mega fleets scaling up to somewhere closer to infinity anyways, and multiboxing 5 abaddons would totally beat this anyways at 1/5 the cost.


there should be no 'end game' - in a balanced game you can fly everything you want and be just as useful as the next guy (provided both of you are equally 'skilled'). you can (re-)discover ships as you train them.
That is just fantasy. The game is extremely unequal, and the idea of progression is still self evident. Depending on the path a player takes, a Vet can make money at >30x the rate over a beginning level 4 runner and field ships with 50x the EHP and 20x the dps to a fight. This is not an memoryless tactical squad combat game, it is a RPG that rewards extremely long term planning in far too many things and have attracted players that plays it as such. A vet have vast advantages in tactical combat and even greater advantages in operational deployments over a new player, and that is something built into the game beyond a few complained about ships.

Sure, some of you would say "well all those things should be removed from the game", but it is unrealistic and I disagree. More power should be available as long as they are reflected with higher costs and higher rewards to players that kill them. That is the basic logic behind risk and rewards.

As it stands now, wealth translates to a "singularity of massive power" as development have been focused on making expensive ships suitable for blobbing.

[Yankunytjatjara]

That looks like a battleship vangel with guns...

[Malaes]

Surely it would be when one becomes bitter and stops logging in?